Thomas Nast, Photographer's Portrait

This albumen silver print by celebrated Broadway portraitist Napoleon Sarony shows Thomas Nast at roughly thirty years of age — already the most feared political cartoonist in America. Nast wears a dark lapelled coat and loose cravat; his heavy mustache and chin beard were trademarks contemporaries recognized as readily as his pen. This is not a cartoon but the man behind them: the German-born illustrator who made Grant a president, toppled Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall graft ring, codified the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey, and drew the rotund, fur-trimmed Santa Claus that displaced earlier regional variants. Sarony's studio lighting flatters a face that opponents found anything but flattering when it appeared in Harper's Weekly.